I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
A week into the MacBook Air and I rate it.
I went for the cheapest one, 80GB hard drive and 2 GB of ram. The disk is only 4800 rpm so it’s no rocket ship but doesn’t seem slow.
The thinness is fantastic. You just take it with you.
The one USB port has not been a problem at all. I just plug into my Dell 24″ monitor which has 3 ports. Also the new Apple thin keyboards have a USB port as well.
I had a few pleasant surprises as I migrated across machines. Copying my iTunes directory meant that my iPod Touch was still in sync. Wasn’t expecting that.
I have a big external drive connected to my Dell monitor so TimeMachine works well. Whenever I plug in it just chugs away. Though Apple is doing some stupid things with TimeMachine over AirDisk. Here one day and gone the other … Apple says Time Machine over AirPort Disk is unsupported feature
The Remote Disk feature works well. Don’t miss having an optical drive at all.
The biggest pain is the ongoing lack of an iPhoto or iTunes server. Can’t believe no one has done this yet.
Still feels like the Air will have a fashion life of 20 minutes as SSD prices come down and new Mac products are released in a few months.
The existing MacBooks are still absolutely fine and it will be interesting to see what they do with them in the next revision.
My dream is still the form factor of an Air, 120GB+ SSD, and ability to drive a 30″ external monitor.
blog
“Don’t miss having an optical drive at all.”
The only thing holding me back from buying one now is working out how to watch DVDs in bed… I guess this isn’t a needed feature for yourself Rod?
SSD’s aren’t as good as everyone assumes them to be. The common misconception is that SSD’s are as quick as flash memory or RAM. That’s not true, they are mostly faster than HDD’s based on read access, but are usually slower (sometimes significantly) than HDD’s on write access.
Ars Technica recently reviewed both models of the Mac Book Air - http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-ssd-review.ars - and concluded it wasn’t worth it for the extra $1300 USD.
Also, for a technical overview of why SSD’s aren’t all their cracked up to be, read this post: http://ibmstorage.blogtown.co.nz/2008/02/13/flashdrive-performance-sucks-am-i-serious/
AppleTV didn’t come across. Have to resync. 3000+ songs and photo’s over wifi. Yikes!
Johnny
If you have another computer in the house the MAC can read the DVD from there (acts as a virtual drive - can be a mac or a PC).
Richard
[...] to be out done by all the other Kiwi’s enjoying new Apple toys recently (the likes of Rod and Nic), after a bit of a discussion with Nic about his recent purchase of a Time Capsule I [...]